Two Years Of ‘Bidenomics’: Limited Public Awareness and Skewed Perceptions of Who Benefits
By Katja B. Kleinberg
January 22, 2025
In 2022, the Biden administration passed landmark legislation to authorize massive government investment in US manufacturing and construction, including semiconductors and green technology. By April 2023, survey results indicated that only about a quarter of respondents in the United States had heard about it.
Implementing policy programs, including identifying or developing suitable projects and disbursing funds takes time. Much of the early work takes place out of the view of the public, and by 2024 still few Americans had felt the effects of new government investments.
In July 2024, we asked a representative sample of 2,900 US respondents how much they had heard about new government investment in their own state or local community. Overall, 28% of respondents said they had heard ‘some’ and 5% said they had heard ‘a great deal.’ Democrats (34%) and Republicans (30%) reported similar levels of awareness. Two thirds of all respondents (66%) had either heard ‘not very much’ or ‘nothing at all.’
Figure 1. Awareness of New Government Investments
How do Americans expect government investments to be distributed? A key goal of the Biden-Harris administrations’ policies is the revitalization of US manufacturing industries, which have been in decline for decades in many parts of the country. Our survey found that 18% of all respondents expect ‘a lot’ of investment to go to states where manufacturing has declined, and 63% expect at least ‘some’ investment to flow to these states. Democrats (24%) were markedly more likely than Republicans (17%) to expect significant investment in hard-hit states.
Figure 2. Expectations of Investments by Partisan Identity
Despite receiving at least nominal bipartisan support in Congress, the legislation is strongly associated with a Democratic president, leading some commentators to label the broader approach ‘Bidenomics.’ During his 2024 campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump hinted that his administration would reverse these (and other) Biden-Harris policies or at least try to block the distribution of still unallocated funds. At the same time, there is reason to believe than such may meet resistance, including from Republicans. In fact, ‘red’ states have received a disproportionate share of new public investments.
Does the identification of the policies with the Biden-Harris administration shape the public’s expectations about the distribution of funds and projects? Our July 2024 survey asked American respondents how much of the government investment they expected to go to Democrat-led states versus Republican-led states.
Figure 3. Perceptions of Investment Targets by Partisan Identity
Perhaps unsurprisingly, partisan differences on this question are stark. Nearly a quarter (24%) of Democrats expect Republican-led states to receive ‘a lot’ of the new government investments while only 11% of Republicans do so, though majorities of both parties expect these states to receive at least ‘some’ investment. In contrast, 17% of Democrats expect Democrat-led states to receive ‘a lot’ of new investment while a third (33%) of Republicans respondents do.
Americans’ perceptions as captured by our survey do not reflect where in the country these public investments were (and are) going, perhaps because most respondents had not heard much about the policies at the time of fielding, at least as they applied to their own states and local communities. Yet even among those respondents who claimed to have heard ‘some’ or ‘a great deal’ about these government investments, a greater proportion (28%) expected ‘a lot’ of funding to go to Democrat-led states than to Republican-led states (20%). And while roughly equal proportions of Democrats expected significant funds to flow to ‘blue’ states (25%) and ‘red’ states (26%), Republicans in this group were more than twice as likely to expect investments in ‘blue’ states (36%) than red states (15%).
How these perceptions will influence policymaking by the Trump administration remains to be seen. One approach would be to wait until investments already approved under the Biden-Harris administration—again, predominantly in Republican-led states—become visible to the people living in those states. When new production facilities and jobs materialize over the coming months and years, Republicans stand to reap significant political benefits from policy initiatives most of them had vehemently opposed.
A broader question is whether growing local awareness will generate not only more accurate perceptions of where public investments are going but also boost support for additional government intervention in the US economy.
Katja B. Kleinberg is an associate professor of political science at Binghamton University, SUNY. She is co-principal investigator of the Foreign Policy in a Diverse Society project, housed in Temple University’s Public Policy Lab.
This research was undertaken as part of the Foreign Policy in a Diverse Society project (DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/QJR49), which is supported by funding from Carnegie Corporation of New York.